Mayors Want More Arrests-Is This Our Last Chance To Control Crime?

Highlights

Will cops return to proactive policing without assurances and guidelines? Are there firm rules of engagement?

Chicago Mayor Lightfoot deems 2022 ‘make-or-break year’ for lowering violent crime.

New York Mayor Adams addressed a roll call of officers and told them that “we have their backs to do their jobs.”

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I wrote in July that a crime counterrevolution was coming. It’s now arrived. Mayor’s across the country are expressing frustration with growing violence and fear. Per the Washington, D.C Chief of police, “People are really mad as hell right now, and I don’t blame them, because I am too. That’s the reality.”

Residents and businesses are fleeing cities. People are afraid to shop in commercial areas. No one is willing to invest in high crime areas. Jobs and economic prosperity are lost. Communities are denied places to buy groceries or prescriptions.

I’m told that behind the scenes, business and community leaders are expressing extreme frustration with violence. It’s a return to previous eras when people in similar positions demanded a strong police response and enhanced arrests. The only question is the degree of support for law enforcement when things go south.

I Want It Written In Stone

Via a multitude of responses from police officers through email and social media, cops want assurances that they will have community support when things go bad. “I want it written in stone,” one remarked. “It’s impossible to proactively stop people without extreme risk of negative encounters. No one wants to end up on the front pages of every newspaper in the country for making a mistake.”

Thus the dilemma; we won’t return to effective policing until mayors and governors provide some sense of assurance that unmalicious split-second decisions taken in the heat of a violent encounter won’t end in public humiliation or worse.

The only modality that indicates reductions in crime are proactive police strategies via the US Department of Justice and the National Academies of Sciences. Proactivity means that officers will take their own initiative to approach someone when they have the legal right to question or search. Proactive policing embraces a variety of tactics. But proactivity has major challenges. Every encounter carries risk.

Violence is destroying cities. Community leaders are demanding action. Per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, thousands of officers are leaving the job. Because of perceived unfairness, families are demanding that their officer loved ones get out of policing; they want them out now. Per media reports, cities throughout the country are stating that they don’t have enough officers to respond to calls. Per the Police Executive Research Forum, there is a 63 percent decrease in police applicants.

Thus the return to proactive policing is in jeopardy regardless of the demands of mayors or anyone else. USDOJ research tells us that police use force “or” the threat of force occurs in two to three percent of millions of police encounters. But that’s not the narrative portrayed in media accounts where every significant mistake ends in headlines and public humiliation.

Yes, some officers are guilty of illegal use of force, so stipulated. They should be held accountable.

But the narrative of a mostly violent force of cops is unsupported by the data. Public opinion surveys rank cops as one of the most trusted entities in America regardless of demographics.  Policing is rated far higher than the media, academics, and just about every other profession.

Chicago

From The Crime Report, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot indicated in a recent closed-door meeting that Chicago police leaders will lose their jobs if they can’t bolster arrest numbers, clear more murders, and get officers to engage more with city residents, reports the Chicago Sun-Times. Lightfoot and Chicago Police Supt. David Brown didn’t present clear plans to address the city’s surging violent crime or the department-wide staffing woes while giving the directive.

Sources called the message’s tone “threatening” and said it essentially meant “make do with what you have to get more arrests.” Instituting an official arrest quota wasn’t relayed to those in attendance, but sources said they were told the numbers would be monitored. Chicago Police Supt. David Brown said that the department this year aims to log 1.5 million positive community interactions as he and Lightfoot again sought to quell fears about violent crime.

Critics argued that the push to raise the department’s flagging arrest numbers will likely only lead to more petty arrests, which could then erode the public trust the department is looking to build with the community interactions and hit Black and Brown communities the hardest. Brown promised to add 200 more homicide detectives, set a goal to collect 14,000 applications from prospective new officers, roughly double the number collected last year, and promised a class of 100 detectives in the next two months. Through December of 2021, less than 12 percent of 203,530 reported crimes resulted in an arrest, according to city data.

Per the Chicago chief, “You think we were just going to let you get away with killing people? You think you’re just gonna carjack people in this city and get away with it? Smash and grab our retail and our businesses who work hard to put products on their shelves?” Brown said. “We’re coming after you. We’re going to hold you accountable, and we’re going to keep you in jail.”

New York

On Sunday, Eric Adams heard from families whose loved ones were gunned down, CBS2’s Thalia Perez reported. The images from the city’s gun violence crisis is disturbing, and the new mayor’s message to those behind the crimes is powerful.

“You will not bring violence to this city. That is not going to continue to happen in the city of New York,” Adams said.

Adams spent his second day in office with NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell and elected officials, listening to the stories of trauma from families who lost loved ones. In 2008, Marie Delus lost her nephew, Pierre-Paul Jean-Paul, Jr., after he was gunned down in Cambria Heights, Queens. He was 20 years old. She said her message to the mayor was survivors need help, too.

“If you lost somebody to gun violence in your area, in your house, in your housing facility, you should be moved because you’re in danger, too,” Delus said.

At the precinct for just the second time in five decades, Adams addressed a roll call of officers and told them that “we have their backs to do their jobs.” “But,” he told the press afterwards, “there’s a covenant that we’re establishing. We’re establishing this covenant where we will give them the tools and support they need. But we are also going to hold them to a high standard. We are not allowing abusive officers to remain among our ranks.”

On Sunday, after the roundtable in Harlem, Adams also promised that the NYPD would focus on crime victims and their families going forward. He said there were more than 1,800 shooting victims in 2021, a 141% increase over the prior year. “We must turn this around and we will turn this around,” he said.

To do that, his first plan is for newly installed NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell to create a plainclothes unit of officers to go after gangs and illegal guns. “It’s my mission, along with the mayor, to never stop working to rid our city of illegal guns,” she said.

Conclusions

The data from the National Institute of Justice is clear, proactive policing works. Research supports the fact that cops are judicious as to the use of force. Policing is a well-respected institution regardless of demographics.

But after the protests and riots and media coverage besmirching the reputations of all 700,000 cops and 300,000 police employees, to suggest that cops are wary of the new demands of mayors is today’s vast understatement.

NYC Mayor Adams’s statement addressing a roll call of officers and telling them that “we have their backs to do their jobs” is being met with skepticism.

Chicago can demand all the arrests it wants but officers will remember all the endless stories of cops making split-second mistakes and, in their opinion, being crucified for them.

Somewhere, there has to be a reckoning.  Cops need to know exactly what the public wants in terms of stops. What laws do they want enforced? What constitutes a proactive stop? What are the exact parameters as to the use of force?

Until that happens, many fear that cops will continue to leave policing or to be overly cautious as to stops. Detractors demand that cops do their jobs. I have a suggestion, let detractors put on a uniform and accompany officers on the job. Let’s see how well they do under the same circumstances.

Policing requires equal treatment for all citizens regardless of who they are. It’s fine when society demands that officers be held to high standards. All of us took an oath to uphold state and US constitutions. Citizens deserve quality, impartial policing, nothing less. Cops get this.

But when the job becomes impossible, when the risks become ridiculous, when they are harshly and endlessly criticized for doing what community leaders and mayors demand, they will leave or go dormant until they can retire or transfer to more supportive environments.

Cities, the choice is yours.

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